Pushing the Queer Agenda: How the Policed are Becoming the Police

Despite the LGBTQ community’s history of overcoming exclusion from society, it is far from universal acceptance of those who fall outside of the LGB. There is especially still prejudice towards asexual people, a group who often refer to themselves as ace.

Courtney, who asked to only be referred to by her first name, came to realize her sexuality only a couple years ago after hearing a story about asexuality on NPR. That was followed by frank discussions with her then – husband and eventually a divorce that ended their eight-year relationship. Like many LGBTQ folk, she has a poor relationship with her mother. Her mother is a therapist and refuses to accept Courtney’s sexuality as legitimate.

Courtney has a passion for music and is part of an LGBTQ community band. She attends a support group for ace folk at The Center called The A-Team, which meets on the first Monday of every month at 6 p.m.

“It’s still hard for them to wrap their minds around whether asexuals are in the community versus not. I’ve probably had more just blanket acceptance from people who are not in the LGBTQ community,” Courtney said. “I was accepted into the community by being an ally pretty easily, so I don’t really know what the difference is in how people see me as an ally versus ace. It’s invalidating and surprising that they wouldn’t accept that or accept that you’re going through a hard time.”

Although she prefaces that she has had far more positive experiences than negative, she noticed that other queer folks believe that their struggles have been harder. This lends itself to asexual erasure within our community.

As can be expected, negative experiences for asexual people still come from straight people as well.

“I had had a bigger deal with my mom, who’s probably the only person who verbally refuses to accept that this is a thing and not some sort of psychological breakdown, but she’s a therapist, so she’s got her own views on the world,” said Courtney.

Courtney went to an older lesbian friend of hers who came out in the 70s, hoping that because of this, her struggle would be easily understood. She was wrong.

“Her response was like, ‘OK, I guess this isn’t a big deal?’ That was one of the most dismissive experiences I’ve had,” Courtney said.

In the documentary (A)sexual, prominent queer activist Dan Savage said that asexual people don’t belong in the community, because they don’t need to fight for the right to “do nothing” sexually. He also dismissed the idea of a spectrum specific to asexuality.

“If you’re beating off, you’re probably not asexual,” he said.

Courtney is an example of a person who identifies  as ace but doesn’t meet Savage’s self-described high bar for asexuality.

“I’m asexual because I feel like that term fits better, but it’s not a black and white thing; I’m like a very, very dark gray.”

Sable Schultz is the Transgender Program manager at The Center in Denver and oversees the transgender booth at PrideFest every year, where she gives out buttons or flags for underrepresented sexualities like asexuality.

“The amount of people, especially youth, that I saw coming up and just being so excited to see that I had these buttons for asexual identity there was just amazing,” Schultz said.

While Courtney has had more positive experiences, she has talked to younger asexuals who haven’t. She says they hesitate to tell those close to them, even after years of knowing their own identity.

In 2004, Brock University Professor Anthony Bogaert did the first and only major study on asexual prevalence. More than 18,000 British people were involved in the study, and just over 1 percent (195 people) were considered asexual by the researchers.

That is more than the prevalence of bisexuals as determined by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, which comes in at 0.7 percent.

In her ideal future, Courtney hopes that there will be no need for a community and that everyone, no matter their identities, will accept each other for who they are. But she recognizes that in the meantime, communities are good for collaboration, sharing experiences, and helping your fellow members through difficulties that are similar to yours.

Schultz believes that resistance to accepting asexuals under the LGBTQ umbrella is because, when people already included think about asexuality, they feel like their sexual activity is being judged or their choices are under attack.

But there are many similarities between the struggle of asexual people and the other oppressed sexualities. They hear the statements that are all-too-familiar to queer folk: “It’s just a phase,” or, “You just haven’t met the right person yet.”

“There’s an attitude that if a person is asexual, there must be something wrong with them; Oh, maybe they’re just having issues with their libido or something like that,'” Schultz said.

An additional layer of difficulty for asexuals is finding a partner who is interested in a long-term relationship that is not sexually focused. She wants to be clear that not all LGBTQ relationships are purely about sex, but that they certainly have sexual components.

Schultz herself has been in a committed relationship with an asexual and aromantic person for some time now.

“At least from my own perspective and my own experience, it is possible to be in a long-term, committed relationship with an asexual partner, and that that relationship can be just as powerful and just as important as one based around classic concepts of sex and romance,” she said.

Aromanticism is similar to asexuality in that it is the absence of an attraction, but it refers romantic feelings towards any person instead of sexual attraction.

Asexuals have to offer an important perspective on love. Their sexuality shifts the focus of relationships from sex to romance.

“In Ancient Greece, people had multiple types of love or ways of looking at love. One of the strongest they felt was the platonic love. The love of your relationship, your connection, your sibling-to-sibling or a person that you bonded with over experiences in your journey.”

Schultz uses the idea of diversity as a counterargument to the stance that, since the community is mostly focused on one’s sexuality, folks without a sexuality don’t belong.

“If we are about sexual liberation and sexual choice and sexual diversity, then a decision or a desire not to have sex has to be included and embraced within that struggle,” Schultz said.